Effective communication is essential to enabling successful collaboration. It enables collaborators to build common ground, to foster ideas, to develop the complex interpersonal relationships that facilitate effective interactions, and more. In the modern workplace, successful collaboration translates into improved productivity, creativity, and the overall well-being of workers. An important aspect of effective communication is having ongoing group awareness, which includes knowledge of current projects, the current status of co-workers, and how actions of group members may affect other group members.
Fostering group awareness has become an increasingly difficult challenge in today's modern workplaces. Workers may have flexible schedules (e.g., working outside the typical 9-6 workday, working in different time zones, etc.) or may work from remote locations (e.g., such as distributed work locations, client sites, at home, public places, etc.). Furthermore, workers use increasingly using specialized collaboration tools (e.g., video chat, virtual world, social networks, etc.) to communicate with peers. Accordingly, determining group awareness of co-workers is difficult, time consuming, and error prone. Thus, it is highly desirable to provide a system and method for determining a presence state of a person without the aforementioned problems.